In many industries, when a professional provides a transactional service for a client (such as executing a trade in the securities industry), the professional has discretion over the price (i.e. the professional's fee or commission) charged to the client for the service. Ultimately, the price charged by the professional must be within the market-acceptable boundaries, or clients will go elsewhere. However, if the price charged is too low, the professional may have a high volume of business, but, in fact, not be earning the maximum amount of revenue available to them.
While the discretion over pricing allows professionals much freedom to reward client loyalty, or encourage new business or more desirable business, many salespeople and sales force managers with such discretion find it a source of difficulty and frustration. In practice, many professionals do not have a reliable sense of how they themselves price transactions and are uninformed as to the actual pricing behavior of their competitors. In some industries or firms there are “benchmarks” that are commonly used by professionals (with some tinkering to account for differences between their clients, the types of assets being transacted and the types of transactions). However, the benchmarks are often out of step with market realities. Ideally, a professional should be able to charge a client “what the market will bear” but this is difficult without accurate and up-to-date information on the state of the market. There is also pressure on professionals in certain industries or particular firms to maximize revenue by charging higher prices. However, with little reliable guidance, it is difficult for a professional to know how to adopt a pricing strategy that is competitive and revenue-maximizing, without losing touch with his own client, asset and transactional variables.
Such transaction pricing information has started to become available. Professionals can now use reports of their past pricing behavior and evaluate their pricing against prices charged by their peers (e.g. U.S. Pat. No. 7,028,006) or against reference prices based on historical data (e.g. US Published Patent Application No. 2008/0097886 A1). However, it would be desirable to make comparison data available in a simple visual format at the time it is most needed by the professional—when preparing a transaction for execution, and determining his commission. This would further allow the professional to change the commission in light of the specifics of the transaction and comparison data with similar historical transactions before executing the transaction (committing to the commission).